When Patricia Mattingly and a few other high school players gathered in the stands to watch Navy volleyball compete for the first time, they fell into a dream.

They were on the court, wearing the Midshipmen gold, white and blues. Only, it wasn’t just a regular season match. It was the Patriot League final. It was the match-point. And they’d hit it.

“When we were on one of our visits, we decided as a class, after watching the team play one of their home games, we’re going to win a Patriot League championship in our team here, at least once,” said Mattingly, now a senior setter at Navy. “We are going to make it to the NCAA tournament.”

The Mids (21-8) are just two victories away from fulfillment, set to tackle Loyola Maryland on Saturday in the semifinal and, likely, American in the final the next day. The seniors who planned for this four years ago don’t have another shot.

“It does put [on] a lot of pressure. We’ve been here for three years,” libero Sydney Shearn said. “But that same pressure does motivate you. If you have that pressure, you don’t want to let yourself down, you don’t want to let your teammates down.”

Katie Patrick wasn’t on that genesis visit, but Mattingly reached out to her future middle blocker immediately to plant the idea. When the two met at Navy volleyball camp as juniors, they were fast friends. Though coming from different parts of America meant the two had wholly different volleyball backgrounds, Mattingly and Patrick had a connection so strong that, had they just been normal students, they think they would have found each other anyway.

“Larry Bock, our old coach, said the first time he saw me play, ‘You have such a great connection with [Patricia],’” Patrick said. “After he saw me play with Trish is when he offered me. Before that, they were a little ‘Eh, maybe we’re interested in her.’ But when they saw me play with Trish, they were like, ‘We have to have her.’”

Bonded by that long week of volleyball camp and their mutual commitment, the Navy-bounds kept close in touch before freshman year. Mattingly added anchor and volleyball emojis to each teammate’s name in her contact list. They swapped answers to a flurry of questions they had about life at the Naval Academy, storing up information like squirrels on the brink of winter so that they’d feel a little braver heading into four years of service school.

“A lot of people in our class had to warm up to the idea,” Patrick said.

Army West-Point reached out to Patrick when she was an underclassman in Aurora, Colorado. She bucked the idea for playing at a service school.

“By the time Navy contacted me, I was a little older, a little more mature,” she said. “They caught me at the right time. I visited somewhat reluctantly and left thinking this was the greatest place in the world.”

Phil Hoffmann / HANDOUT

Navy volleyball player Katie Patrick will lead Navy against Loyola on Saturday in a Patriot League semifinal.

Navy volleyball player Katie Patrick will lead Navy against Loyola on Saturday in a Patriot League semifinal. (Phil Hoffmann / HANDOUT)

Shearn hadn’t thought about Navy until her club teammate from across the Ohio River, Mattingly, became smitten with the Mids.

“It's easier to come on to a team when you know someone as well as I knew Trish,” she said. “We just clicked for a long time, and we were able to impact that on our whole team.”

The trio made an imprint in Navy volleyball that culminated in three shattered records this season. Mattingly, just named the Patriot League Setter of the Year for the third year running as well as earning two academic honors, broke the old Mids assists record with 3,733 (also 10th in Patriot League history). Patrick did the same for blocks (378); Shearn made her mark with digs (1,635), which ranks fifth in league history.

“It’s kind of relief, like, I know I’ve hit a mark,” Shearn said. “I know that I’ve had some sort of effect on this program, and that was all of our goal coming in.”

But freshman year didn’t have the sterling start they’d imagined. The Mids had thin success in 2015, falling to 2-17 by the middle of October.

“The tough first half of the season forced us to get close to each other,” Mattingly said. “At the midway point, we figured out what we needed to do and how we needed to act around each other to be successful.”

It was around this time that the rookie-heavy Mids embarked on a four-match win streak, going on to close the season with three straight victories.

“When you’re young, sometimes experience is going to beat you out,” Patrick said. “But then we figured it out.”

In the next season, the Mids flipped the script of the previous year, going 20-9 and reaching the Patriot League tourney. They padded another three wins to the mark in the following season, even defeating American, the top team in the conference and one that no Mid volleyball squad had bested since 1989.

“To have the impact we do to where teams are looking at us differently has been huge,” Shearn said.

But they still didn’t have what they envisioned as high school hopefuls — a league title, berth to the NCAA tournament.

“Even when it wasn’t in sight for us, when we were 2-17 as freshmen and it felt like a pipe dream, I don’t think we ever lost sight of it,” Patrick said.

In May, Paco Labrador replaced Bock after the former coach’s retirement, charged with the somewhat uphill task of tinkering with players set in their 15-plus years of volleyball experience.

His first step was to call every one of them, but the job was made more difficult — actually reaching a Navy player over the summer can be complicated. Labrador found Patrick on a ship in Japan.

“The bottom line is once I did get a chance to talk to all of them, I asked them basic questions like what brought them to Navy and how they got a team that was in the middle of the pack, maybe lower, to in three years under their guidance that’s gotten so much better in a short period of time,” Labrador said. “Talking a lot about what parts can I add to an already well-functioning system and team. What I [didn’t] want to do is come and rework everything, reinvent the wheel.”

Labrador includes the seniors in his process, watching film and drawing up game plans as a unit. They made it clear from the jump, he said, what the one thing they wanted out of the season was.

“In the end, every time they’re lifting weights, every time they’re watching film, every time they’re making good decisions as a midshipman, they’re doing it for the Patriot League championship,” Labrador said.

With Mattingly and Shearn, the coach didn't alter much, just pushing Mattingly to be a little riskier and tinkering with Shearn’s serve so that the ball would leave her hands more quickly.

But in the coach found something untapped in Patrick — back-of-the-court defense. As a westerner, Patrick grew up with the style of tall girls on the front-lines, cracking kills to win games, and the 6-foot-2 blocker fit the bill.

“Katie’s a good example of someone who had two jobs as a hitter and a blocker and I asked her in certain scenarios to play more defense,” Labrador said. “Hard at first, but it started to work and she started to see the fruits in it.”

With records gone by, the final regular season shut down — they’ve each even received their graduating service assignments from the Academy — the pressure, in a lot of ways, has fallen heavy on the trio’s shoulders.

“There’s so much more we can do,” Patrick said. “Not much time left.”

Patrick said she can’t pinpoint when she played her brightest day as a Midshipman. Maybe sweeping Army in the 2017 playoffs, she said, emboldened by a electric crowd that didn't know much about volleyball but felt their blood boil when the number-one rival was nearby.

Maybe it was defeating American for the first time too, she said. But she wouldn’t consider either her greatest accomplishment.

“I’d like to think I don’t have it yet,” she said.

“If I can see one,” Mattingly added, “it’ll be something we do together as a team. Hopefully, we see that on Sunday.”